Sometimes wrestling with depression can seem an awful lot like having to deal with a truculent eight year old.
It is 7:00 in the morning, and the alarm goes off. When you aren’t feeling depressed, that means that you get up without thinking about it too much, and take a shower or make some coffee to start the morning.
But when you are depressed, the alarm going off can lead to an extensive internal conversation that sounds a lot like the conversations that take place in a household with grumpy or somewhat rebellious kids.
Why do I have to get up this morning? Do I have to get up now? Wouldn’t it be okay if I just lie here for a few minutes and catch up on sleep. I’m feeling so tired. A couple of minutes won’t hurt.
If you ever wonder why it is that depression is so exhausting, some part of that fact is surely the endless internal dialogue that takes place about almost any activity: making your bed, getting up in the morning, going out for your morning run, etc. Everything has to be discussed and argued about and the process of getting anything done becomes overwhelming as a result.
The fact of the matter is, however, that all of these conversations are not really designed so much to lead to understanding of the reasons for an action, they are all about trying to get out of doing something, trying to get out of doing something that is often clearly, in the light of thoughtful reflection, a good idea.
Why do you have to get up in the morning? Well, if you don’t, you’ll lie there thinking back and forth about whether you should or shouldn’t, and the result is likely to be much more exhausting than if you just simply, reflexively, got out of bed at the usual time. In fact, there is nothing quite as exhausting as lying in bed thinking about whether to get up or not. That extra time in bed actually, clearly, decisively, makes you more tired. But in the bog of depression or in the early morning space of fatigue, all of these questions seem to be reasonable ones.
Again, it is a bit like the situation where a tired parent is dealing with a somewhat rebellious child. Usually, that parent is able to quickly see that the why questions are not really questions at all, and, one way or another, take care of them by saying “that’s the way things are,” or “because that’s how they work best,” or, at a pinch, “because I say so.”
If you’re feeling a bit depressed, let me encourage you to shut down some of those long conversations early. Recognize that trying to figure out whether you can get out of doing something that you always do when you’re not depressed is almost always a bad idea. Try as much as possible to stop the conversation, do the thing that you usually do, and then afterwards, you can figure out whether you want to change your habits. But in the morning, when you’re tired, is not really the time to rethink your routine. If you do this, you will soon find that your life is a little bit less stressful.